Did you follow the medal count in the Olympics? Every night my children would dutifully report how many golds and total medals the USA had compared to China. I quickly realized how the US-centric coverage was one more way my children were being indoctrinated into a culture in which “we” ends at the border. With a few rare exceptions, such as the accomplishments of the South African “Blade Runner,” the Olympics, supposedly about the highest ideals of sport, pushing the human body to its greatest capacity, instead became about hoarding …

Please don’t take offense at what I am about to write. It is truly not directed at any one in particular. It is a reflection of the tension and desolation I am feeling within myself. I am going to write about something people have a very hard time talking about publicly and I must admit that in 42 years of being a Catholic have never really heard addressed directly in church (which is part of the tension and desolation in which I find myself today.)

Quick! Take out a pen and paper. Write down the first thing that comes to your mind in answering the following questions:
What do you despise?
Of what are you most afraid?
Who is your enemy?
What is your greatest weakness?

In first grade I was taught by a little old nun who was barely a foot taller than the rest of my classmates. She managed to not only control, but engage a classroom of 35 first graders (unheard of in today’s teacher-student ratios) with mere strength of character rather than voice or discipline. This was in a Catholic school in Ohio run by two other women religious. They lived in the convent, got by on very little income (nothing near what the lay women teachers were paid), and were …